Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [97]
On January 10, 1941, Churchill welcomed Hopkins for the first time in the little basement dining room of Downing Street—the house was somewhat battered by bomb blast—for a tête-à-tête lunch which lasted three hours. The guest opened their conversation with the forthrightness which characterised Hopkins’s behaviour: “I told him there was a feeling in some quarters that he, Churchill, did not like America, Americans or Roosevelt.” This was Joseph Kennedy’s doing, expostulated the prime minister, and a travesty. He promised absolute frankness. He said that he hoped Hopkins would not go home until he was satisfied “of the exact state of England’s need348 and the urgent necessity of the exact material assistance Britain requires to win the war.” He then deployed all his powers to charm his guest, with unqualified success.
Hopkins’s intelligence and warmth immediately endeared him to Churchill. Throughout his political life, the president’s man had decided upon courses of action, then pursued them with unstinting energy. If he arrived in Britain with a relatively open mind, within days he embraced the nation, its leader, and its cause with a conviction that persisted for many months, and did incalculable service. That first Friday evening, the American drove to join the prime minister and his entourage at Ditchley, in Oxfordshire, Churchill’s weekend residence on moonlit nights during the blitz, when Chequers was perceived to be vulnerable to the Luftwaffe. The text of the Lend-Lease bill, now beginning its hazardous passage through Congress, had just been published. Britain’s dependence on the outcome was absolute. However, Churchill warned the chancellor, Kingsley Wood, that he himself would say nothing to Washington about looming British defaults on payments for arms should Lend-Lease fail to pass the U.S. legislature: “We must trust ourselves to [the president].”
Hopkins was extraordinarily forthcoming to his hosts, who welcomed his enthusiasm after the cold scepticism of Joseph Kennedy. That first weekend, on the way to see Churchill’s birthplace at Blenheim Palace, the envoy told Brendan Bracken that Roosevelt was “resolved that we should have the means of survival and of victory.” Hopkins mused to the great CBS broadcast correspondent Ed Murrow, then reporting from London, “I suppose you could say—but not out loud349—that I’ve come to try to find a way to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas.” Churchill, for his part, diverted his guest during the month of his visit with a succession of monologues, strewing phrases like rose petals in the path of this most important and receptive of visitors. At dinner at Ditchley, the prime minister declared:
We seek no treasure350, we seek no territorial gain, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his rights to worship his God, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble labourer returns from his work when the day is done, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat-tat [here he rapped on the table] of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest. We seek government with the consent of the people, man’s freedom to say what he will, and when he thinks himself injured, to find himself equal in the eyes of the law. But war aims other than these we have none.